Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht is facing life in prison after being found guilty on all seven charges relating to his establishment, and running of the notorious darknet marketplace.

Known online as “Dread Pirate Roberts,” Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013 on charges including conspiring to commit narcotics trafficking, conspiring to commit computer hacking and conspiring to commit money laundering.

Ulbricht’s lawyers took an interesting, and yet now failed defense that saw them admitting that Ulbricht had set up the site, but that he never controlled it for most of his existence, and that he was simply a fall guy for those that did. They further alleged that disgraced former Mt. Gox CEO Mark Karpeles was “Dread Pirate Roberts” and ran the site.

However, federal prosecutors relied on more than conjecture, presenting the court with hard evidence that Ulbricht was the Silk Road mastermind. One FBI agent told the court he was able to trace 3,760 Bitcoin transactions over 12 months which ended in late August 2013, from Silk Road’s servers to Ulbricht’s Samsung 700z laptop, which was seized when he was arrested in October 2013. The Bitcoin traced was worth a total of $13.4 million.

Upon reading the guilty verdict on all counts a courtroom observer shouted “Ross is a hero” to U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest.

Ulbricht’s lawyers said they will appeal the verdict, in particular on the grounds that Judge Forrest blocked blocked a number of witnesses from giving evidence in support of the defense case.

Even if not given life imprisonment on the guilty verdicts (one of the charges alone has a 20 year sentence) Ulbricht is still facing separate charges of hiring a hit man to murder as many as six people in Baltimore, Maryland later this year.

photo credit: via photopin (license)